13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Books and Reading, Books and Reading - United States, Smiley; Jane - Authorship, General, Books & Reading, Smiley; Jane - Books and Reading, American, Literary Criticism, Fiction - History and Criticism, Novelists; American - 20th Century, Fiction - Authorship, Authorship, Novelists; American, Fiction, Smiley; Jane
ISBN: 9781400033188
Google: f_tYpfLUD-sC
Amazon: B001NJUOO4
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2005-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

2. Snorri Sturluson Egilssaga

TRANS. BERNARD SCUDDER, IN THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS, ED. OBERT KELLOGG (1220-40;

REPR., NEW YORK: PENGUIN, 2000), PP. 3-184.

Egilssaga, the only saga for which we have a likely author, is written as the biography of a single outstanding man, like The Tale of Genji. Like all sagas, Egil's story begins with his progenitors and ends with his descendants, but the saga is exceptionally unified in its focus on Egil and its development of his character and position in relation to his social world.

Egil's world slightly predates Gudrun's—it is the Viking world of ninth-century Norway, during the reign of Harold the Fairhaired, who temporarily unified Norway under his own hegemony between about 880 and 900. Egil's grandfather, Kveldulf (“Nightwolf “), is Harold's contemporary, and Egil is the contemporary of Harold's son Erik Blood-Ax. Whereas the action of many of the sagas focuses upon or is confined to Iceland, the action of Egilssaga takes place all over the Viking world—from far northern Norway (Finnamark) to Denmark, Scotland, England, Ireland, and Iceland. The saga is full of Viking raids (which in later sagas have evolved into trading expeditions or explorations after new lands such as Greenland and Vinland). Egil is both a preeminent fighter and a great poet, and the portrait of him develops not by analysis by the narrator, but by means of close scrutiny of all of his actions from age three to his death eighty years later. Egilssaga is exemplary in its use of the materials and techniques that were in some sense left over from the age of the epic and that had become less grand and heroic as they entered the age of history and memory.

Kveldulf, his son Skallagrim (“Bald Grim”), and his family have a practical problem: King Harald has vowed to bring all the kings and chieftains of the various districts of Norway under his power, and he is using both war and politics to do so. Those chieftains he cannot buy, he builds alliances against, and tries to frighten off. If he cannot frighten them off, he does battle with them, or attacks them and kills them one by one. Kveldulf sails for Iceland. There is no sense that he is cowardly in doing so, but resentment and a sense of enmity remain. The king gains and keeps his status by fighting. There is no holy or anointed element to the respect the conquered show him; he just happens to be the biggest dog on the block.

Egil commits his first killing as a boy, during a game. The victim is an older playmate who throws him contemptuously to the ground. Egil buries an ax in his skull. Throughout his boyhood, Egil is portrayed as hard to manage; he even threatens to kill his father, Skallagrim. He grows up to be a head taller than most men, bald, and ugly. He is as famous for his ability to write poems as he is for his prowess in fighting, and he is a continuous irritant to Harald's sons.

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